UDK

Finally here are my renders from UDK. I decided to go with midday map, just lowered a brightness a bit to create more dramatic look. I think this lighting suits my diorama the best.

Diorama textures

Here is my diorama in Maya, fully textured.

Diffuse and Normal maps. All normal maps been made with xNormal from bw images by using Leavon's technique. When I needed more depth I just changed the mode to 16 bit and overlayed the normal map few times with a bit of gaussian blur. For wood textures I used a bit of surface blur on the bw image before converting to normal map to avoid to noise. 

Barricades+ med kit

Flag+ weapon box

Ground edge+ spiked wire

Ground

Snow texture for vertex painting

Diorama

Here is my diorama fully modeled and unwrapped.

Barricades + med kit UVs

Barricades Lightmap

Flag+weapon box UVs

Flag lightmap

Ground and ground edge UVs.

My diorama consists of less than one 1024x1024 texture. Here is my split up, 5 textures in total if counting texture for vertex painting.

Texturing

My base texture for FV432. I used Difference Clouds and then played with filters.
Clouds->pixelate (or crystalize for more round look)->Cutout->Water Paper or Sprayed Strokes.

Base iron texture for tank treads.

Everything else was matter of painting scratches,dirt,some decals and material shift by changing values.

Normal Maps

For Normal maps I first created all the high poly bits that I needed and then baked them to the plane.

To help me place all the normals in the right place I mainly use AO map, in the beginning my normal map resolution was 2048 and then I resized it to 1024 with bicubic sharper mode.

I also made normal to cavity conversion in xNormal filter.

UVs

In this project I've used a lot of overlapping UVs. It worked this time, but I need to be more careful in future. The obvious advantage of this technique is UV space saving, on the other hand there are 2 minuses, 1- loss of variation (doesn't really matter for parts that not suppose to draw attention) 2- lots of seams, works especially bad with UDK.

 Example of how UVed smaller wheels that almost not going to be seen.

Finished Low-poly block-out.

So here is my finished block-out .

Side view.

Front view.

Back view.

Top view.

3/4 wireframe view. 

I decided to use my poly budget this way ( 8500 for model 1500 for diorama) because otherwise I would lose many nice details on the actual model, and the model is the main object of attention, diorama is suppose to support the model. I think I will be able to pull out diorama with 1500 tris, I am thinking about the winter theme. There are still a lot of details to be added with normal maps.